12 April 1996: Yahoo goes public and more than doubles
Yahoo's shares started trading on April 12, 1996, priced at $13. Investors piled into one of the few ways to own the young web, and the stock more than doubled on its first day. The company had only a few dozen employees. Yahoo became a dot-com icon, later passed on chances to buy Google, and in 2017 sold its core business to Verizon for a fraction of its peak value.
The lesson: Being first to a new market is no guarantee of owning it when the market finally matures.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Yahoo at the start of 2000 → $481 today, vs $4,626 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2000, the first year in our price data after the event. That is a loss of $519, while a plain index fund over the same years made $3,626.
What Yahoo teaches: Sometimes a company's best asset is a passive investment; for years the market valued Yahoo's core business at roughly zero once its Alibaba stake was counted.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $108 | $481 | $4,626 |
| 2003 | $16.00 | $3,250 | $7,727 |
| 2005 | $38.00 | $1,368 | $5,763 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Yahoo? Every starting year and the full story →
More Yahoo history
- 1 February 2008: Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo
- 25 July 2016: Verizon buys Yahoo's core for $4.8 billion
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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